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Facebook ID Probe Shows Things Getting Worse
An anonymous reader writes "According to Sophos, Facebook users are getting sloppier with their personal info, not better. Revisiting a 2007 survey in which a plastic frog got 87 hits out of 200 friend requests, this time a rubber duck and a cat got 87 out of 200 friend requests, plus a bonus 8 friends who decided to trust them anyway. The research also suggests that older Facebook users are sloppier than the young, being keener to build their list of friends. (The older users had more than 4x the friends each, on average, than the young.)"
I personally have 2 accounts. I use one strictly for games where I will accept any and all takers. I post to lists to increase my numbers and can see from 20 to hundreds of requests per day. That account has no real data.
My other REAL account only has REAL friends and Family. I scrutinize every request and all personal settings are very tight as to only allow friends to see the data. I'd consider myself an 'older' user @ +40. From what I have seen, this is not uncommon.
I'd probably accept anyone who cares enough to "friend" me, whether I know them or not. Mark me in the 43.5%, a guy who once accepted a friend request from "Some Pencils" and a random girl in Arizona (thousands of miles from me) just because she was a girl. What are these people going to find out... my hometown? My college? My favorite tv shows? Who cares? I don't think I'm really stalker material, and iIf my favorite movies are that important to some guy writing a corporate spambot, whatever, he can have it. He can't even find my address or my phone number on facebook, two things I consider more personal, and _those_ you can already find in any phonebook site.
Hell, maybe we're _more_ careful about our personal info since facebook doesn't really have anything on it that we value.
Well, this is based on a completely unscientific poll of my brain cells, but it seems older users would be more likely to, at least initially, treat sites like Facebook as something new to just try out, a fun toy more than a serious part of their lives, and thus less likely to care that much about how they expose themselves on such a site.
I assigned all of my "game friends" into their own group and then used Facebooks group security to limit the personal information that they can see.
Does that actually work at the moment? A few months ago myself and a friend had a play with those features and no matter what settings he used I kept being able to see everything I could before we started. Admittedly we didn't report the issues nor have we bothered re-testing (so maybe our experience is just a fluke or a temporary issue at the time).